Topless meetings for team focus?

Our good pals over at Adaptive Path have been experimenting with banning laptops and other communication devices in meetings (something I've supported in the past). From today's Mercury News:

Frustrated by distracted workers so plugged in that they tune out in the middle of business meetings, a growing number of companies are going "topless," as in no laptops allowed. Also banned from some conference rooms: BlackBerrys, iPhones and other personal devices on which so many have come to depend...

But as laptops have gotten lighter and smart-phones even smarter, people have discovered a handy diversion, making more eye contact these days with their screens than one another. The practice became so pervasive that Todd Wilkens turned to his company blog to wage his "personal war against CrackBerry..."

His San Francisco design firm, Adaptive Path, now strongly encourages everyone to leave their laptops at their desks. His colleague, Dan Saffer, coined the term "topless" as in "laptop-less." Also booted are mobile and smart-phones, which must be stowed on a counter or in a box during meetings. It took some convincing, but soon people began connecting with one another rather than with their computers, Wilkens said.

Thankyou for sharing your real-world experience of this. You are right about tuning out, laptops are just a more visible sign of that.

I am rather a loud-mouth with great job security, so I will tell pretty much anybody, without cruelty or judgement, that their meeting is not relevant to me. For those less bull-headed or with more precarious employment we need to invent a pocket "clicker" that would indicate to the meetings chair/current presenter that he was losing attention.

Birmingham University in the UK used to have something called a "lecture cube" for gauging the speed or uptake of a lecture. Perhaps that could be adapted to big meetings?

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